Living space for outer space

Aerospace engineer/entrepreneur Susmita Mohanty has been living a simulated dream come true this week: She’s making her home in a Mars habitat. No matter that the habitat is actually in a desert in Utah rather than on Mars. Figuring out how to make life more livable for space exploration is her passion, and her place among the crew at the Mars Desert Research Station is as close as she can come to the real thing, at least for now. “That will be a fantastic experience, to understand what it took the Mars Society to actually construct the habitat in the middle of nowhere,” she said in an interview before her two-week desert stint began.